1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the selection of advertisements for display in online web pages.
2. Background
According to one definition, advertising is a paid, one-way communication through a medium in which an advertiser is identified, and the message (i.e., the advertisement) provided by the advertiser is controlled. Advertising may be performed for a variety of purposes, including publicity, public relations, product placement, sponsorship, underwriting, and sales promotion. A variety of mediums are used to convey an advertisement, including television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and billboards.
Online Advertising relates to the promoting of products and services using the Internet and World Wide Web. Typical online advertisement types include banner ads, floating ads, pop-up ads, and video ads which are provided through a browser to the user's computer desktop. Such advertisements may be placed on a web page to be displayed to the user when loaded by a browser, for example. “Contextual advertising” refers to a form of Internet advertising/marketing where advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on content displayed to the user. For example, a contextual advertisement selection system may scan the text of a web page for keywords, and select advertisements based on any keywords located in the text. When the web page is displayed for the user, contextual advertisement selection system provides the selected advertisements for display on the web page.
Users may visit particular web pages over and over if they find the content provided by the web pages to be enjoyable and/or useful. For example, a user may repeatedly visit a same web page to check for updates or changes to the content of the web page. Current techniques for advertising do not fully take into account the tendencies of users to revisit web pages. As a result, such techniques may not provide advertisements to users with as high of relevance as possible, leading to lower ad revenue, among other issues.